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Clintonian Dedication to Privacy

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Golden State Bailout

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7/10/00 9:20 a.m.
Clintonian Dedication to Privacy
The Clintons have continously assaulted the privacy rights of others.

By Jaime Sneider, editorial page editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator

Mrs. Clinton ridiculed New York television stations following the Central Park sex attacks saying, "I believe it was wrong to show the faces of the women being assaulted without getting their permission first." Both Clintons have been universal supporters of the right to abortion — Bill Clinton vetoed the partial-birth-abortion ban twice, citing the need to protect the private decisions of a woman and her doctor. Similarly, the president's wife praised the Supreme Court for their recent ruling in Stenberg v. Carhart, asserting on her web site that while she wishes abortion were "rare," it is a private decision to be made by an expectant mother.

Their true record on privacy becomes apparent once one considers their dedication to furthering big-government and Big Brother. In 1994, Bill Clinton proposed a health-security card, which would have a magnetic strip containing the holder's entire medical history. The president also endorsed a worker-registry system that would create a national database of American workers and provide each with an identification card, so as to prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining jobs. According to the Cato Institute report, "Senator Feinstein (D-Calif) has even urged that the ID cards contain individuals' photographs, fingerprints, and retina scans."

Mrs. Clinton backs a similar registration system for guns, using every opportunity she has to bring attention to that fact that unlike her senatorial opponent, Rick Lazio, she supports gun registration. Her web site maintains "individuals seeking to buy a handgun should be required to obtain a photo license from their state of residence." (Australia and Britain adopted gun registration — quickly followed by gun confiscation.)

Even though an independent prosecutor decided against prosecuting the Clintons for the hundreds of personal FBI files mostly of Republican leaders and appointees found in their possession, there remains a swarm of controversy related to Filegate.

Carl Limbacher of newsmax.com said on Wednesday that allegations regarding Rudy Giuliani's father and his possible criminal past may indicate that the mayor is the latest Filegate victim. An excerpt of Wayne Barrett's upcoming book on Giuliani appears in this week's edition of the Village Voice. Barrett's investigation began about a year ago, around the start of Mrs. Clinton's listening tour. As Limbacher correctly observes, details about Giuliani's father didn't surface, even after three political campaigns, until the president's wife began hitting heads with the mayor. The criminal history of any member of his family would have been present in his FBI file because Giuliani was a U.S. District Attorney in New York.

Lazio claims that the First Lady may have triggered the Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation of an investment he made with a brokerage firm whose executives were major donors to his campaign. In a six-week period, he turned a $2,300 investment into $16,000. After giving a speech to high-school students about the need to invest their future earnings in the stock market, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson suggested impropriety saying, "The best advice he could have given [the students]was the name of his broker." Wolfson must have neglected the possibility of enlisting the advice of Mrs. Clinton, a rookie commodities speculator who turned a $1,000 investment into $100,000 in 1978-79.

As Dick Morris recently noted, the Clintons spent $100,000 in federal campaign funds on a group of private investigators employed for the specific intent of digging up dirt on women claiming to have had sexual relations with Bill Clinton. Of course, there are also those pesky audits that seem to afflict a substantial number of outspoken Clinton critics.

Juanita Broadderick said on national television that the then governor of Arkansas raped her; she was audited this past May. Paula Jones was audited in the middle of her sexual-harassment lawsuit against the president. Actress Elizabeth Ward Gracen faced an audit after recanting denials of a suspected sexual relationship Clinton in 1983. Her lawyer even reported that she received a call saying, "You should really keep your mouth shut about Bill Clinton and go on with your life. You could be discredited. You could have an IRS investigation."

By their own words, the Clintons are not the great defenders of privacy they hypocritically claim to be. And if only a small amount of the evidence and allegations against them prove legitimate, the Clintons' actions deserve to be considered an unparalleled assault on privacy by a sitting president and his wife. Just remember that the right to privacy as far as the Clintons are concerned should exist only in so far as a woman has the right to deliver a baby three-fourths, and then allow a doctor to insert scissors into the back of its skull and use a suction tube to remove the brain.

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